10 Innovators Who Changed the World in 2013

These brilliant engineers, designers, and dreamers captured our imagination by creating swarms of smart rescue robots, cars that drive themselves, and a rugged rover that could change the way we think about exploring the Red Planet. They are PopMech's 2013 Breakthrough Award winners. (See also the 10 Breakthrough Products of 2013.)

The Techno Optimist

The Techno Optimist

Editor's Note: On Thursday, October 17, Diamandis will be doing a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) at 1 pm Eastern. Find it here.

Leadership Award

Peter Diamandis

For a man with such outsize influence, Peter Diamandis has a surprisingly small office. Or maybe it just seems small because it's so filled with stuff—a treadmill desk, a regular desk, a coffee table, a couch, Star Trek memorabilia, model planes, astronaut action figures, toy UFOs, dozens of badges from conferences and speaking engagements, and a framed poster of 28 "Peter's Laws," including "The squeaky wheel gets replaced" and "The ratio of something to nothing is infinite."

That densely packed office, located in Playa Vista, Calif., seems symbolic of the breadth of Diamandis's ambitions, crammed into a single human life span. Through the X Prize Foundation, which he started in 1995, he uses competitions and cash prizes to jump-start innovation in the aerospace, automotive, environmental, technology, and life-science fields. He is an unflagging optimist who believes that humanity's challenges are surmountable through technology and ingenuity. (Read our interview with Diamandis here.)

"Curiosity landed, drove 500 meters, and hit pay dirt," says principal project scientist and Caltech geologist John Grotzinger. That pay dirt was a gray soil sample dug up by Curiosity from just beneath Mars' red surface. The soil's chemical makeup proved Mars once had enough fresh water to sustain life. "Modern Mars is red and inhospitable," Grotzinger says. "Ancient Mars was gray and habitable if you were a simple microorganism." The Curiosity program has proved that it is possible to deliver heavy payloads to Mars and to collect valuable samples. Next NASA hopes to land a craft that can bring those samples back to Earth.